Supporting Geographic Education with OpenStreetMap and AGS

Today I was lucky enough to present at the State of the Map US conference in Detroit, Michigan. The topic is near to my heart, the education initiatives of the American Geographical Society, specifically, the growing relationship between AGS Geography Teacher Fellows and the OpenStreetMap community. The slides are posted below, and the talk was filmed so expect the video will be here. Ultimately we asking for help from the OSM community to help AP Human Geograpy teachers with technical support around mapathons. If interested, sign up here: bit.ly/AGSmapathons

Support Geographic Education with OpenStreetMap and the American Geographical Society

A core tenet of the American Geographical Society (AGS) is expanding geographic education. To that end the AGS, and its corporate partners, have established the Geography Teacher Fellows program, and over the last three years have directly engaged with 150 Advanced Placement (AP) Human Geography teachers across the United States. A key piece of the Geography Teacher Fellows engagement is the introduction of OSM mapping and mapathons to the human geography curriculum. The response to this TeachOSM-led training has been overwhelmingly positive, but teachers have been limited in their adoption of OSM mapping by the technical hurdles of conducting a mapathon. To address this gap, AGS is looking for volunteers from the OSM community that would like to be paired up with AP Human Geography teachers in their area. The idea is that a local mapper would work directly with a local AP Human Geography teacher to put on a mapathon, to provide onsite tutorials, or to simply be available to answer questions of students and teachers in their locality. For more information, see the AGS website (https://americangeo.org/initiatives/ags-geography-teacher-fellows/) or sign up directly online (http://bit.ly/AGSmapathons)